VMware interfaces shut after adding Netscaler VPX HA pair

[Matt Dover1709158400]

This is kind of a shot in the dark, but I figured I’d ask anyway. So I added a second VPX VM and configured HA last week and all seemed well until our server admin informed me what happens if he moves the VPX VMs onto the same host. It looks like for some reason the VLAN port gets shut down and the only way to fix it is to move all the client servers to a different host and reset the physical server. 

 

I followed the guide I found here http://www.carlstalhood.com/netscaler-11-1-system-configuration/#ha but I left the network configuration alone. Meaning I didn’t separate the 2 interfaces on different VLANs. I asked Citrix support and they said they recommend separating them but it is not necessary. I guess my question is, could the fact that I didn’t define the interfaces on separate VLANs cause the problem we are seeing in VMware?

 

Oh and yes, we added a rule in VMware to keep the VPXs separated onto different hosts but now we are seeing the same behavior on the host server that only has a single VPX on it… Just wanted to throw it out there and see if you guys had ever heard of this happening.

 

Thanks!

 

[Clint Weldon]

Did you ever receive an answer on this? I'm looking to add a network card to an ha pair running on VMware esx with vmotion.  I've already got the rule in place to keep the vm's separated but now concered of this issue you mention. Thanks

[Erick Larin]

I'm working on deploying new VPX's in HA mode on our ESXi infrastructure. We have our data NIC configured using a vSwitch tagged with VLAN 4095 (802.1q VLAN tagging). In our testing, all of our virtual servers are not reachable after a vMotion. They appear online in the UI. We are using VMXNET3 NIC types and are on firmware 13.0-47.24.

My co-worker found this VMware KB article which somewhat explains what we are experiencing - https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2113783.

For us though, the virtual servers don't ever become reachable. We have to power off the VPX VM's and power them back on to resume service.

 

[Erick Larin]

Update from my last comment. While this hasn't been tested yet, it may be possible to generate egress traffic sourced from the ADC VPX by running the "send arp all" command. Our VI administrator needs to move some VM's around for maintenance so we will be testing this out when we vMotion one of the VPX's.